Burial of the Archaeologist
July 1936. Francisco Franco and his fellow army officers attempted a coup d’état against the young Spanish Second Republic. They did not expect the resistance of the Republicans and their allies, and the result was a bloody civil war that lasted until the Spring of 1939. This conflict was made of radically divergent political positions, and the clash of old and new ways of waging war. Colonial troops fought against urban militiamen, while the most sophisticated aircraft bombed a European metropolis for the first time. Moors reentered social imagination by being forced to fight along with their former enemies, the Christian crusaders. The arrangements of this shift in enmity under colonialism may sound confusing, but only on the surface. Alfredo González-Ruibal, author of Volver a las Trincheras. Una Arqueologia de la Guerra Civil Española (Alianza, 2016), reminds us that this war is strangely close: it was fought by our relatives and neighbors, and flashes in our consciences through the images of the Syrian Civil War, and other current conflicts.
July 2016. A team of archaeologists returned to the trenches of Madrid to reveal the lives of those who fought to defend the capital from fascism. Rui Gomes Coelho was one of them and jumped in with his camera. The performance of digging a context like this is not devoid of political significance. Archaeologists who work on recent sites like these are always being reminded that past events continue to pulse through our everyday lives. Witnesses, relatives, activists, politicians, outraged citizens; they stare at our excavations, and they all make sense of our work through their own social imaginations. To some extent, archaeologists unfold themselves into those social characters while at work. The same could be said of photographers. Ariella Azoulay, in The Civil Contract of Photography (Zone Books, 2008), suggests that the visual encounter of a photograph generates relationships that invite us to consider and confront urgent ethical and political issues. Archaeological remains of a conflict, like war photographs, may invite us to unthread the relational bundle that ties us archaeologists-viewers with the dreams,and pains of those exposed to our gaze.
In The Burial of the Archaeologist Rui Coelho portrayed the affective anxieties aroused during the archaeological work in Madrid, finding inspiration in the pictorial work of El Greco (1541-1614) and later Iberian tenebristas. In The Burial is an archaeologist who digs from Monday through Saturday, and ruminates on the shadows projected over his own craft—his professional duties as a scientist. This passion ended during the backfilling process, when the archaeologist’s colleagues decided to bury him.
The Burial of the Archaeologist was previously exhibited at ‘Sightations’, a collective show organized by Joana Valdez-Tullett, Kate Rogers, Emilia Mataix-Ferrándiz, Helen Louise Chittock, Grant Cox, and Eleonora Galdonfi at the Theoretical Archaeology Group meeting in Southampton, 2016. Special thanks to Carlos Marín Suárez, the “buried” archaeologist.
For more information about Rui Gomes Coelho of the Cultural Heritage and Preservation Studies, Department of Art History, Rutgers University, follow this link:
